Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [311]
The horse didn’t like the double burden, and slowed. He must get another, immediately, or get down and let Andro go on. In town, horses were easy to come by. Here, there was nothing. He couldn’t even remember seeing a farm: just a lot of warm, empty countryside with happy larks trilling too high to be seen. Lucky larks.
Andro, thinking along the same lines, said, ‘Listen for cattle, or dogs. There. Do you hear it? Barking.’
Nicholas heard. It came from behind, and was blessedly some distance off. Fortunately, he didn’t have to explain, because Andro had realised what it was. ‘Bloody hell!’
He twisted round and stared at Nicholas, and Nicholas, who couldn’t see very well, attempted to think. He had had concussion before. It wore off. But before that, they had to separate, fast. Wodman should stay with the horse, which could probably outrun the hounds with one rider. Gloucester’s men couldn’t detain him in any case: there was nothing to connect him to Nicholas. Nicholas himself had only to hide.
Wodman worked it all out for himself anyway. He made for and splashed over a stream, and then located a neighbouring peat bog at which he halted, dismounted, and manhandled Nicholas to the ground. From there, he pushed him down to the floor of the cutting and heaved the stack of peats thudding down over him.
‘Will that do?’ he said. He had hardly spoken throughout. The barking was now very much louder.
Nicholas said, ‘Are you mad? Of course not. Good luck.’
Nicholas lay, as under a mound of heavy, cold, malodorous blankets, and listened to Wodman’s horse squelch quickly away. The dogs arrived very soon after that, and he heard men’s voices, and the tread of horses, and splashing. Then there came a shout, and more baying, followed by a concerted sound of hooves on the far bank of the stream. Presently, both the hooves and the barking receded.
Wodman must have laid a fresh trail. In any case, the water had baffled the hounds. The peat would have confounded them, too. Clever Andro. Clean Andro. Andro wasn’t going to be dark brown and stinking for all the foreseeable future. The new Charetty colours: pea green and burnt umber.
He managed, in between vomiting, to improve on his covering, and give himself air. He hoped it wouldn’t rain. He felt, in general, gloomy. He wondered if, having failed to catch Andro, the men would come back the same way. Or if, having caught Andro and tortured him, they would certainly come back the same way. He thought not. He thought of Andro these days as someone like Crackbene, or le Grant, whom he trusted to do what was right.
At any rate, Wodman now carried the family silver. The dispatch from the front. The report of all Nicholas had discovered. He hoped to God he remembered it. Part of it was simple enough: the probable size of the army at York; the numbers still to arrive at Durham and Alnwick and Berwick. First target: Berwick, employing heavy artillery, and allowing time to warn Albany’s friends that he was about to make for the throne. Given enough popular support, they would then invade up the East March, and take the King. Alternative: if disappointed in Albany’s friends and threatened by a Scots army, a probable pitched battle at Coldstream, with Norham prepared as a base.
At that point, Andro’s reaction had been one of disgusted alarm. He had already expressed himself—they all had—on the subject of Albany’s volte-face in his attitude to the English. ‘So he does plan to usurp the throne, the little bastard. And that’s the hell of an army. That’s the biggest for decades. What’s Edward thinking of?’
‘His obituary, some say. There’s more.’
‘What?’
And so he told him. He remembered the sick look on Andro’s face, turned towards him. ‘After all that show of patriotism, he bought himself the throne by promising Scotland to Edward?’ And after a space he had said, ‘Once they know that, no one will follow him.’
He had spoken with satisfaction, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that few would follow Albany anyway, except for personal profit, and that these